OUT OF HEAVEN
Two twins, a brother and a sister. He tells their story. Of when they were young and each found their respective loves. Of her fatal illness. Of the loss of dreams and hope. Of pain. Of her death and his difficult path to adulthood.
from LA REPUBBLICA
… a novel of great intensity with great psychological and “visual” tension (...) Battiato has created a long itinerary with several pages I will not easily forget.
(Corrado Augias)
from L’UNITÀ
(Andrea Carraro)
… the beautiful debut novel “Out of Heaven” by Giacomo Battiato eludes labels and classifications, making exhaustive interpretation and criticism difficult thanks to his original style and ability to surprise the reader frequently with sudden twists (...)the novel’s final, vaguely romantic meaning (the pairing of love and death, violence and irrationality of passions, suffering of man enclosed in the cruelty of nature) and his style which moves forward through associations, dream-like symbolism, and jumps in chronology that seem to coalesce around the inevitable tragic fate of a girl...
from L’INDIPENDENTE
(P. M. de Pozel)
... the novel is “hot-blooded,” loaded with the contradictory emotions typical of a boy’s first steps toward love. Four women are the source of his anguish and the fruit of his passion, one of whom is his twin sister (...) Battiato presents their “special understanding” in a poetic style that, at times, alludes to Greek tragedy...
Two excerpts…
I move toward the door. The doorbell rings again. On tiptoes, I put my eye to the peephole and then jump back. Leonora is there, her face covered with blood. I open the door. Her eyes are dilated, and she leans toward me, her expression lifeless. She whispers, her voice only a wisp:
“I’m sorry…”
I don’t understand. I fear something terrible has happened.
Leonora breathes raggedly, leaning on me:
“I love you, I’m sorry…”
I hold her up from under her armpits and, with a strength that is not my own, I drag her to the bathroom where she wants to go. Her dress is torn and streaked with black.
Leonora gestures for me to turn on the water in the bathtub while she undresses. Her dirty, torn clothes fall around her feet. I look at her: scrapes on her thighs, knees, and arms, as well as her face. Coagulated blood. Blood still dripping. I grab a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and pour it on her. Leonora lathers herself with bubbles, a rosy foam from her sizzling wounds. Her eyes dilate from the burning, and she keeps repeating:
“I’m sorry…”
Maybe she smiles, a hint of a smile. Why does she smile after saying sorry?
She goes into the water, which turns red.
“Hold me by the arm. I’m afraid I’m going to faint.”
I obey. Leonora sinks down, even putting her head underwater. She stays under for a few seconds. Bubbles come out of her pale lips. She resurfaces.
After a few minutes, she drags herself out of the tub and lies down on her back on her towel on the floor. She closes her eyes. I walk a few steps away. Her beautiful, naked sixteen-year-old body is long, streamlined, and full. A little fatter and more swollen than it should be because of the cortisone they’re pumping into her. The drops of water remain still on her white skin nestled between the blonde hairs around her bellybutton, her pale nipples, and her neck. Now, I look at her genitals. Her pubic bone juts forward, or at least it seems that way to me, in an unnatural proffer of her labia. Naked and drowsy on the floor. I desire her.
Then I got a towel and covered her. I softly dried her off so I wouldn’t press down too hard on her wounds, almost afraid to touch her even through the towel. I helped her get up. She clutched me around my neck and placed her feet on the floor. That’s how I dragged her to this bed.
I sat next to my twin sister in silence.
“Don’t say anything to Papa or Mamma.”
Leonora looks at me and squeezes my hand.
“Why?” I ask, but I want to say: what happened?
“They worry, and they’ll get scared. There’s no need. It was just a moment.”
She stares at me. I look at her eyes, and my heart is pounding.
“I spent two hours on the top of the Duomo. I was staring down, then I sat down among the spires. I looked down again. And then I sat back down among the spires. At a certain point, they started singing in the church, and the sound of the choir floated up there. Then, the airplanes flew over. Then, the fog came. I kept going to look over the edge and then sitting back among the spires. I must have done it a hundred times. A guard noticed my movement and kept an eye on me. He came near me. He told me he had a family and that I shouldn’t get him in trouble…”
I listen. I understand and don’t understand. I feel like I can hear the Duomo’s choir: «Benedicta es, Virgo Maria, in saeculorum saecula...» She continues speaking:
“… So, I went down. I walked until it got dark. I saw the number 27 coming, and I jumped in front of it.
The blood on her forehead has congealed.
I feel the pain of the crash. I can feel my face on the track of that tram. I can hear the screech of the brakes and her torn skin. I can feel the pointed stones from the trackbed on my knees. I look at her, bleary-eyed.
“I could tell right away I wasn’t dead. I bounced. I knew that I hadn’t broken any bones either. So I ran away. I ran here as much as I could. Sorry…”
She scampered away into the night like a runover cat that somehow came out from under a car. She ran in the darkness without feeling hurt.
When I heard this story, I lost my adolescence and my youth, and I became old. By her side, I was deprived of freedom and joy. By her side, I found myself cast out of heaven.
I go towards the window. The room inside is bare. There is only a small table where a girl has almost finished building a house of cards. She turns her back to me; I can barely catch a glimpse of her profile. Her placement of the last card on the top is slow and delicate, her lips pursed in concentration. In vain, I try to decipher the features of the young woman who takes no notice of my presence. I look for similarities between us. I look for them in my memory and imagination. I look for them in her clothing and her colors. Nothing. I am her same age, yet I seem so far from her and so old. I can’t understand how the brief/infinite time has passed that separates me from the girl.
“… If I could hold you once, just once against my heart, all this emptiness would be filled!”
The girl can’t hear me; her beautiful hands fan open as if protecting her house of cards.
Without making a sound, I close the window panels together so a gust of wind will not blow the house down. Doing so, I see my reflection appear on the glass. In awe, I suddenly can read all the scars.
Beyond the window, the girl turns and looks at me. I recognize her, but I don’t know how to address her. One day, maybe, she’ll have a name.